Toward a Better World
As a child growing up in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum, Asha Jaffar never would have dreamed she would be able to one day graduate from college and work as a journalist. But thanks to the Kibera Girls Soccer Academy (KGSA), which provides free high school education to girls living in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, the 23-year-old has been able to blossom. “If the school was not there, I would not be the person I am today,” Jaffar says.
And if it hadn’t been for the determination of Ryan Sarafolean, a University of Minnesota graduate, KGSA may never have flourished.
Sarafolean learned of KGSA while having a beer in a bar in Nairobi while enrolled in the university’s Minnesota Studies in International Development (MSID) program in Kenya, which sends university students to the East African country to study international development and take part in social justice internships or research. Now he heads the KGSA Foundation, which provides financial and technological support to KGSA.
Sarafolean, who graduated in 2007 and majored in political science and African American studies, says he was drawn to the MSID program because “I wanted an experience where I could work within a community instead of being in a classroom studying culture from the outside. I’ve always wanted to go to East Africa, to see and experience that part of the world, and part of it was to experience poverty,” with the overarching goal of helping to alleviate it.
The University of Minnesota MSID program is one of
